kc00l’s Gearworks

Gearworks adds one Suit, which you wear in the chest slot and build up for the whole game, and the Bore Lance, a spear that mines a whole Bore of rock at once. Inside the Suit is a Gear Grid: lay out upgrades for battery, 4 kind of generators, reach, speed, jump, shield, night vision, flight and boost, each covering a rectangle of the grid, then raise their Levels with no cap. Everything runs on FE.

Why?

I wanted a suit like Mekanism’s MekaSuit: one piece of armor that grows with you from the early game to the end, powered like the rest of your base.

I also wanted the layout to matter, as in Factorio’s modular armor, where every module takes room in a grid and a bigger suit is a bigger grid. Levels never cap, so there is always something to spend power and materials on, but each Stat closes in on a Ceiling, so no suit breaks the game.

NeoForge, Minecraft 26.1.2 only. Please report anything odd on GitHub.

Features

• One suit, three tiers. The Iron, Diamond and Netherite Suit are worn in the chest slot with the armor of their material’s chestplate, and each tier’s Gear Grid is larger: 9×3, 9×4 and 9×6. A tier is made from the one below and keeps its upgrades, their Levels and its FE.
• A grid to lay out. Gear Upgrades cover rectangles of the grid: Battery, the Solar, Nuclear, Kinetic, Combustion and Metabolic Generators, Speed, Shield, Jump, Night Vision, Reach and Boost, and Flight, 2×5, which fits only the Netherite Suit. The grid opens from the worn Suit anywhere, with a key (J by default).
• Levels with no cap. At the Gear Bench an upgrade’s Level rises, each costing more FE and materials than the last, from copper and redstone up to netherite and nether stars; any mod’s pipes and hoppers stock the bench. Speed, jump and shield approach a Ceiling, and Flight flies faster and draws less with each Level. Two upgrades of one Stat together still stay under its Ceiling.
• Flight and Boost. Flight is creative-style flight while the Suit has FE, and a Suit that runs dry lets you down gently. Boost throws a flying player along their gaze, as a firework throws a glider, then cools down.
• Powered by FE. The Suit stores power only in its battery upgrades, and any mod’s charger fills it. Its Generators make their own: solar by day, nuclear always at a steep cost, kinetic as you walk, combustion from coal and blaze rods in your inventory, and metabolic from your saturation, never your hunger. Its FE stays on the HUD.
• A lance that bores. The Bore Lance is a spear with Lunge built in and a mining tool in one, in iron, diamond and netherite. It breaks a whole Bore of rock at once, up to 5×3 and three deep, and a key (B by default) steps through the Bores; hold left-click while sneaking to mine one block. Its lunge bores through the rock ahead, at a far higher cost. The netherite lance runs on FE, which any charger or the worn Suit fills.
• Plays alone in vanilla. Gearworks needs no other mod; in the -works suite it is where your factory’s power goes to work on you.

For pack authors

Each upgrade’s size, Stat, amounts and FE draw are the gearworks:gear_upgrade item data map, each tier’s grid gearworks:gear_grid, and each upgrade’s Level costs gearworks:level_cost, whose materials are c: tags with vanilla defaults. The Ceilings, Floors, metabolic’s FE per saturation point and the Netherite Bore Lance’s FE costs are in the server config. What combustion burns is the item tag gearworks:suit_fuel. The blocks a Bore Lance mines and bores are the block tag gearworks:mineable/bore_lance, a pickaxe’s by default.

For mod authors

A mod adds a Gear Upgrade with an item, an entry in the gearworks:gear_upgrade data map naming its size and Stat, and one in gearworks:level_cost pricing its Levels. Gearworks owns every behaviour; no mod ships code for the Suit. The Suit and the Netherite Bore Lance expose Capabilities.Energy.ITEM. CHANGELOG.md lists what each version changed for a mod building against it.

Dependencies

None beyond NeoForge. Gearworks nests libworks-runtime, so there is nothing more to install.

Art

The cover and icon are a Gear Grid of Gearworks’ own upgrade icons (publish/make-cover.py), until an in-game screenshot or an artist’s art replaces them.

The suits’ icons are Futureazoo‘s flight chestplate, retinted for each tier, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Gearworks is never monetized while it carries them.

The Gear Bench is built from Malcolm Riley‘s unused textures, under CC BY 4.0 (NOTICE).

Developing

A 5thlayer Module, released on its own to Modrinth and CurseForge. The design is 5thlayer/factoryworks#666. See GLOSSARY.md for the domain glossary. sh ./gradlew build runs the JUnit tests on a plain JVM, and sh ./gradlew runGameTestServer the game tests headless. Releases go through the libworks plugin’s release task (docs/agents/releases.md). The Modrinth slug is gearworks-adamico, since gearworks was taken there; CurseForge’s is gearworks.

License

MIT, except the suits’ icons, which are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, and the Gear Bench’s textures, which are CC BY 4.0 (see Art). Source is on GitHub. Releases are on CurseForge.

This is a hobby project: I’m not monetizing any part of FactoryWorks. I’m building it for fun, to see how far I can take it.